I don’t think you’re being disingenuous here and English is a crazy language, so here’s the definition google came up with:
noun: capitalist; plural noun: capitalists a wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism.
In the sentence
I’m a capitalist who doesn’t defend billionaires and also doesn’t feel left out…
The word capitalist is a noun.
But even if you were to pull up a dictionary definition of the word that says otherwise, in the context of the economic and political system of capitalism there’s three hundred years of writing that define capitalists under capitalism as various groups of bourgeoisie.
I think we can dispense with petty arguments over the dictionary definitions of words given what we’re discussing. If it will make you feel better I can refer to capitalists as flying purple people eaters.
I think if we just go by that dictionary definition, you being a wealthy person who invests in trade and industry to make a profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism would by definition make you “rich af” and would align your interests against those of the people whose labor allows trade and industrial production.
The people whose labor allows trade and industrial production want to get the highest pay and best living conditions possible, you, as a wealthy investor in the concerns that employ and pay them want the most profit possible. The raw materials of trade and production are fixed quantities so any profit must come from paying the worker less than their labor produces.
Does that make you evil? I don’t know.
You used the example of an etf and I wanna talk about stock and securities trading briefly. A person with enough money can invest it in the market in such a way that it causes huge changes and can basically write their own ticket. Small time (retail, if you’re familiar with the lingo) investors take on quite a bit more risk and while they might hope their bag goes up or down they don’t generally have any control or say over what happens to laborers or industries and certainly not any power to control markets.
There’s an argument to be made that the move to replace pensions with invested retirement funds was explicitly intended to align retail investors and working people with the interests of the very capitalists who needed them to accept lower wages and reduced benefits, but this tea…
I do take issue with using dictionary definitions though, because they tend to be truncated and devoid of the background and context that allow for understanding and use of words in conversation or correspondence. This one, for example doesn’t explain what the principles of capitalism are, only that they must exist because capitalists are people who invest according to them. This definition doesn’t even describe capitalists as a class, which is fundamental to understanding the overwhelming majority of ink spilled in the last few centuries about them and the system they are in control of!